A Mysterious Life

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg - Nicholas Dawidoff

This 1994 biography opens with Bernard and Rose Berg, who at the end of the 19th century emigrated from Ukraine to Newark, New Jersey, to escape endemic anti-Semitism and occasional pogroms. They worked hard to build a brighter future for their children. Bernard Berg was self-taught and became a pharmacist, working 15 hours a day seven days a week. He did not observe his religion. He could speak and read six languages and it was he who taught his youngest son Morris a.k.a Moe his first foreign languages.

Like his brother who became a doctor and his sister who was a musician and teacher, Moe was prodigy. He excelled in both baseball and schoolwork, which allowed him to study and play at that bastion of anglo-saxon protestants, Princeton. To his father’s deep displeasure and disgust, Moe opted to become a big league ballplayer in an era that had very few college-educated players. His long career as a catcher was undistinguished, studded as it was with injuries. Loquacious Berg however took great pleasure in being singled out by the press as a scholar and gentleman, since sportswriters were not used to getting good interviews from the tongue-tied plug-uglies and hayseeds that populated baseball’s ranks.

On more than one occasion Moe declared that he had chosen to be a baseball player for the money and the opportunity it gave him to visit the major cities of the U.S. and stay in good hotels. Moe liked having vast stretches of discretionary time.  All he had to do was show up and play in the afternoon and he had winter off. He passed the bar in New York but when he did take a job at a prestigious firm, he hated the routines of office work and the expectation that he would be easy to find at work..  He quit and later did everything to hide the experience and no one ever understood why. He also loved obsessively reading newspapers, buying at least six dailies every single day. Nobody could touch his unread papers because they were “still alive.”

When World War II broke out, Berg worked for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America's first intelligence agency. To serve his country as the fervent patriot that he was, in 1944 he left for Europe to investigate and thwart the threat of the creation of the atomic bomb by Nazi Germany. His goal was to find out which European scientists were involved in the theory and production of the super-weapon and, if so and if necessary, shoot dead Werner Heisenberg, the brilliant German physicist considered to be in charge of the project. During his numerous trips and meetings with the most famous physicists and scientists of the day, Berg learned that Germany was in fact lagging badly on splitting the atom, a finding in which his superiors had never completely believed. Such is the irony of espionage.

After the war, President Truman disbanded the OSS but Berg remained with the CIA until 1952, when he blatantly failed a mission. In 1954, he was fired. Moe Berg at this point found himself alone, without money. The last 25 years of his life saw him living exclusively thanks to the goodwill and favors of friends. He lived with his brother in Newark until, kicked out when his brother's patience and loyalty finally ran out, he moved in with his sister. Everyone understood, to a greater or lesser degree, that Moe no longer knew how to live without working in the secret services, no longer having a purpose that would allow him to live in secrecy, as he had always done.

One would think that the story of athlete and spy would be really exciting. But not so with this particular athlete and spy. In fact, Moe was an eccentric and there’s no denying that a reader had better be deeply interested in unexplainable personalities if they are to reach the end of this book. For instance, not even in love and romance was Moe lucky, despite being tall, good-looking, extroverted, well-read, charming, and funny. He never managed to establish a stable relationship with a woman, though apparently he had quite a number of affairs and was credited with always being seen out on the town with a knock-out in tow. He wanted to introduce his one serious relationship to the family but his father refused to meet her because the two lived together without being married. That relationship ended because Moe and the war put a lot of distance between them and Moe did nothing to narrow that distance.

After Moe's death, the author interviewed psychologists who studied Moe’s OSS work file and personality. They declared that the main cause of Moe’s shallow friendships and lack of long-lasting romantic relationships could be the persistent disapproval that his father expressed about Moe’s seeming unwillingness to be a serious professional and normal adult. Though on the surface it looks like he just wanted to live life on his own terms, in fact Moe seems to have had a serious case of imposter syndrome, keeping everybody at a distance lest, he feared, they would find out of was a phony. It should also be noted that neither his brother nor his sister ever got married or had kids. His sister in fact was so peculiar that Newark people would cross the street to avoid dealing with her complaints, accusations, and rages. Brilliant people with IQ's off the charts don't often have smooth ordinary lives.

As I hinted above, not much happens in the last quarter or so of the book because Moe did not do anything in his middle and old age except travel around the country and freeload off people who liked him. I would recommend this book to travelers facing long flights or hospital patients or people doing vigils in hospitals because the books is interesting and stimulating without being demanding. I would also recommend this book to people who are interested in case studies of imposter syndrome, though this book was written before that phrase became a thing.